Are videogames deteriorating as a medium?
A good friend of mine posted on his livejournal concerning this issue.
There are several factors that amount to why gaming might feel different now than it did before back in the “good ol’ days.”
After a slight recovery from being sucked into WoW again I decided to finish this game once and for all.
A friend of mine said, quote,
“I’m to fat to do Parkour
Mirrors Edge lets me do Parkour
I love video games.” -J1n
This basically summed up my thoughts on it as well. At first I was appalled when reviewers gave it a “mediocre” score instead of a “great” score. Then I encountered a lot of frustrating moments (including the portions that require the frustrating combat), especially because I really wanted to achieve the “no kills” achievement. If I had only known what was ahead of me.
After playing it for the second time, I encountered a very disappointing aspect of the game, which led to many, many frustrations until I just turned the game off (due to lack of time and higher blood pressure).
I didn’t mention this when I played the demo, but the combat can be really frustrating. No matter, I thought, after seeing the little help screen that said “run away from your pursuers and avoid all combat.” Okay, so far so good. Faith isn’t some kind of hulking beastess taking on 10 guards at a time, she specializes in OMG GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. This isn’t to say that she’s completely incapable of defending herself; she HAS had some form of self defense training and is able to disarm her opponents using a Tai-chi mentality of “using your opponents force against them”.
Gameplay wise, this translates to getting close enough to the guard to provoke them to swing at you with the butt of their guns, and pressing a button to counter and disarm them when their weapon turns red. When the demo first showed me this, I was having a lot of trouble getting the timing right. The weapon also doesn’t turn a bright red instantly. Apparently this “warming up to red” period of time is the wrong time to press the counter button, and since you only get two chances to get it right before you slump to the floor, it can lead to instant nerd rage.
Even WITH the slow motion button, it’s really hard to tell when exactly they expect you to press the countering button, so instead of taking your enemy out in cool-slow-motion animation, you end up getting bitch slapped in slow motion.
Parkour is meant to be about running away efficiently, and although some parts of the game truly have the right essence, they sometimes literally lock you in a room with a group of baddies to take out. Factor in the gameplay mechanic of only being able to take out ONE enemy at a time (more than one and you just end up getting pummelled), you end up with foolishly running around the room desperately trying to lure a guard to a corner to take him out and pray that the other guard isn’t right behind him.
It’s such a shame that the game had to be bogged down by such a terrible nuisance. I’m up to chapter 7 now, and so far the game has been great up till this point. Let’s hope that I either get better at the game, or the game throws me a bone instead of trapping me in a room with several guards with no means of escape.
Fallout 3: Oblivion with Guns (har har)
I must say, having been a part of the “old school Fallout” crowd for quite some time, I was VERY skeptical of the new Fallout. Much to the dismay of the “new comers” to the Fallout universe, who incessently spout that “old school gamers” should sit the fuck down and stfu, it’s NOT because Bethesda took Fallout’s gameplay in a new FPS direction. I’m fine with that. In fact, I’m delighted with the changes.
Nay…my skepticism arose from the tone of the game. Fallout’s always had a wonderful writing cast, and the irony and dark humor that I love so much was never lost in the original series. Upon hearing that they were taking out eye-shots and groin-shots and adding to the fact that Oblivion’s gameplay was utterly boring and dreadful, however, I feared the worst.
Fortunately, my fears were mostly allayed as I began to traverse the world starting as a crawling infant to a fully grown adult. The main storyline was actually engaging, I found myself caring for many of the characters in the game. I noticed a huge improvement in the voice acting department, and I believe they actually doubled the cast of voice actors. Of course, “doubling” the cast of voice actors from two leaves us with merely four voice actors, and once again I felt slightly disillusioned once I realized how the voice actors were being recycled again, but it wasn’t as obviously bad as Oblivion used to be.
The level up system was much better than before as well. I’m glad they kept the skills, but I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed with the SPECIAL system and the perks. In previous fallouts, your base stats actually had a huge impact on how the world would react to the player. If you had low intelligence, you really suffered with dialogue. If you had low charisma, people really acted like you were beaten with an ugly stick several times. In Fallout 3, this aspect was toned down and basically the only real deciding factor in the game was your skill points. Sure, you may get a different line to say every once in a while if you have high enough intelligence, but it’s not a deciding factor if you have enough speech or any other skill depending on the situation. In other words, there’s multiple ways to get to the same “win” result, but not enough restrictive ways to “fail.” That, my friends, is a mark of watered down RPG mechanics.
On a similar note, almost half the perks are utterly useless. Of course, the previous Fallouts had useless perks as well, but instead of being useless and hollow “boosts”, they were more in line with creating a “style” with your character. They were the tools with which to carve your David, not just extra padding on your blow up doll.
Let’s look at an example, shall we?
The perk “Gun Nut”adds 5 skill points per rank for small arms and repair.
At first glance, it may seem like a very good choice if you are planning to create a character focusing on regular handguns and rifles(which there is always plenty of lying around in the wastelands). However, in the grand scheme of things, taking this perk is practically shooting yourself in the foot since 5 skill points is hardly an improvement over the vast amount of skill points PER LEVEL you would get if you had max intelligence. In the face of being able to raise your base stats (especially intelligence) which affects your skill points PER LEVEL, choosing a measly 5 points pales in comparison.
Also, like Fable 2, Fallout 3 suffers from premature ejaculation. Bethesda created a MASSIVE world with many, many side quests, but it’s really up to you to uncover them all. Naturally, one might think that doing the main quest would open up most of the important areas, but beware: the game actually ends before you are ready to end it. I actually ended up not even reaching the max level of 20, stocked up thousands of stimpacks, ammo and weapons for the final battle, and ended up beating the game by accident. Really Bethesda, would it be too much to ask to be able to continue the game after finishing the main story? Part of the fun of RPG’s is building up a character to actually USE the perfected character, you know.
Despite these setbacks, Fallout 3 is still impressive in its own right, it’s really just a few major hitches along the way that really prevent the game from giving that “shiny polished perfect” game.
I come to you from the murky dark depths of the infentisimal mountain of videogame releases. Also known as: November.
It always creeps up on you, as you wander the damp, cold tunnel of darkness, as you reminisce about the games that you left behind, games that you think “maybe I should go back and beat that game…” And then, it happens. It snatches you further into the shadows…and before you know it, you become blinded by the sheer amount of gold that you find in a dark and unexpected corner. Early rejoicing turns to agony as you realize there’s just..too..much…awesomeness. Just too much…for one gamer to bear.
Now, on with the blog.
I present to you: The Oblivion edition.
(A little backstory about my experiences with Oblivion: This is a game that I thought was going to be awesome due to the “huge expansive world” and “non-linear gameplay.” Reviewers couldn’t stop gushing over how lush the environment was, how realistic your horse’s anus looked and just how “fun” the entire game was. I have given Oblivion at least 3 tries, and each time I was unable to bear playing it more than half an hour before I was utterly bored to tears. The combat is awkward and stale, the character level up system is wonky and pointless since the monsters all level up with you anyway, and the fast-traveling mechanic ruins the game completely since you spend time and energy to get a horse when you really don’t need one. Oh and there were only 2 voice actors, one for male characters and one for female characters. Either someone needs to explain to me why this game is so good, or this game was just totally overrated.
FAR CRY 2: OBLIVION IN AFRICA
I made the mistake of choosing a white character in this game, but I heard that there isn’t much difference between the characters besides visual differences such as the forearms you see. I’m not sure if every character is like this but one thing is for damn sure: everyone, and their grandmother, hates your guts. I mean it. It doesn’t matter if you saved a kitten from a tree or rescued wildlife from a random wildfire. No. No I don’t care. Everyone hates you just because you exist. PEOPLE THAT SO MUCH AS SEE YOU ON THE ROADS WILL TURN THEIR CARS AROUND AND HUNT YOU DOWN. JUST FOR BREATHING THEIR AIR. OR SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW WHAT.
The reason I call this Oblivion in Africa is because it gave me the exact same stale and boring feeling I got when playing Oblivion, and yet, it got rave reviews(just like Oblivion). People were bedazzled by the graphics, and while I’ll admit that the game doesn’t look bad, it looks basically on par with everything else on the market right now. It doesn’t hold a candle to the realism found in the Crysis series, however. Reviewers also loved the immersiveness of the game. It would be nice to agree with the reviewers except for the glaring problem of everyone hating you like you’re the white devil.
Imagine you’re driving along a beautiful savanna, wild animals running along side your jeep wrangler(tm) and your eyes squint as you see a beautiful golden sunset upon the horizon… and what’s this? You see a friendly African neighbor driving past you. You watch in confusion as your African brother runs over all the gazelles and zebras as he RAMS YOUR CAR IN A FIT OF INEXPLICABLE RAGE. You stop and ask, “What is your problem, sir?” and you are only met with bullets from his AK 47. Enemies respawn everywhere, across the map, within a few minutes. This means your car will break down every few minutes and it’ll take you twice the amount of time to get anywhere than you normally would have to if you didn’t have this stupid AI characters beating you down every step of the way. What the hell happened to immersiveness??
While we’re talking about NPC’s, you have a bunch of other foreigners (who seem to be in the exact same predicament as you are) who you can help out. They’re supposed to be your “buddies” but all I see are “quest givers”. They also talk monotonously at unnatural speeds. You can literally FEEL the voice actors reading the lines in English. Sometimes for certain missions, you get fed the EXACT SAME LINE. Once again, where’s my immersive environment?
A trip to Africa wouldn’t be anything without an unhealthy dose of Malaria. Instead of actually becoming progressively worse or being a productive plot device, it’s more of a nuisance. Every once in a blue moon you suddenly see yellow spots on the screen, and you need to take your magic pills that make it go away. You only need to obtain these magic pills once, apparently, because you seem to have an INFINITE SUPPLY of them. So now Malaria has just turned into “press H every once in a while to fix your vision!” I have no sense of urgency or “oh shit oh shit I’m gonna die I need medical attention NOW” since I can just keep popping pills for the rest of my life. Once again: where’s the immersiveness?
Now that we’ve got all the bad out of the way, let’s put in some good words, because after all, this is a beautiful looking game. There’s a wonderful article on how fire was implemented as a mechanic, and it’s definitely believable. With a flamethrower you can set fire to almost anything you want, whether it’s people, animals, grass, trees, even houses.
The gameplay, i.e. shooting and running are all pretty solid as well, minus the fact that you can shoot off branches in one shot but you can’t kill a man with a single headshot. It’s just such a shame that they promised so much immersivity and took away most, if not all of it by the incredibly dense and overly aggressive AI.
But IG, what about the quests themselves? Well, they’re pretty repetitive and usually involve lots of driving from point A to point B and killing something/blowing something up. Literally more than half the game is travelling, unfortunately. Which also means running into the hostile natives.
Posted in: Rants
Almost every game you see out these days contain what are known as “unlockables”; those little bonuses that are designed to “reward” the player for sticking with the game till the end. Sometimes, these small rewards become the only reason players clamor for, spending hours upon hours trying to unlock them, or paying more for strategy guides.
But has anyone ever questioned the validity, or the point of all these unlockables? To examine this case further, we must differentiate the unlockables with online viability from those that do not.
Let’s begin with the offline portion of unlockables. Often times, these unlockables follow certain common trends if they exist within a game. These trends are:
1)They are overpowered and capable of breaking all notion of balance within the game
2)They must be unlocked through a series of harsh trials and challenges that either require a hyperbolic amount of time, and/or require just as many attempts, requiring meticulosity bordering on the obsessive-compulsive.
3)Upon receiving the reward, there is nothing left to do in the game, making the reward the end in itself.
Why do developers constantly put in these pointless “gifts” in their games? The only purpose there is to claiming these seemingly impossible bounties is to show off to other gamers how much time you’ve wasted on the same game. It’s nice to have a goals players can set in games, but why would you want to vigorously abuse the player and then award him or her with something that they wanted to use while in-game?
In retrospect, why would developers devise ways that intentionally make players toil away like a prisoner of Shawshank?
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Just take a look at the requirements to unlock the real megaman buster from Dead Rising. It requires the “Zombie genocider” achievement, which means killing killing 53, 594 zombies. You may be thinking to yourself, well, it’s a zombie killing game where you just kill zombies and try to survive for 3 days, so it’s pretty easy isn’t it? Believe me when I tell you that this is not a simple task and it requires utmost patience and an absurd amount of time for a single unlockable. People have actually devised intricate plans to execute this feat involving a systematized route in the underground tunnels of the game to mow down groups of zombies with the provided vehicles(which, btw, break down after killing some zombies and require the player to switch into another vehicle at certain dead-end points), exiting and re-entering the tunnels to “reset” the zombies and vehicles. How long does this all take, you say? How’s about 5 hours of real time sound to you? If you say that 5 hours isn’t bad, then I envy you for having the oodles of time to waste away in our busy, fast-paced lifestyle. But still, to what avail is it? To post videos of your “achievement” on Youtube? Please.
Some games have unlockables that are actually halfway decent, such as God of War’s bonuses involving videos of interviews with the developers, and how the masterpiece game was put together. These sort of unlockables are always enjoyable, and actually help gamers learn more about the game developing process, so this is something that I applaud more than anything. Other unlockables include an additional, insanely difficult God mode, and a choice of different, sometimes wacky costumes to change into that change the way you would play the game. Now, common sense would say that IF the gamer was hardcore enough to actually play through the game one more time, they would want to challenge themselves with the unlocked God mode(which actually unlocks the pointless “uber armor” that breaks the game balance), but they may also want to try to try out the new costumes on their second time through. However, for some reason, the developers did not allow the use of unlocked armor to be used in God mode. What is the point of playing the same difficulty again with your unlocked armor when you could better use your time playing the more difficult mode to unlock higher bonuses? If these “lesser bonus” costumes were enough to break the balance of their insanely difficult God mode, then why even put them in there? For novelty’s sake, perhaps? A comic relief from the “seriousness” of the game? What’s with the overpowered armor that can only be unlocked after you’ve played the hell out of the game again?
Even back in the early days of the PS2, in Devil May Cry, you can see that to unlock “Super Dante”, you would have to beat the game in normal mode, then beat the game in hard mode(which is only unlocked after beating normal mode), then beat the game in Dante Must Die mode, which is an even HARDER task than hard mode. By the time you’ve reached the final reward, what’s the point of playing the game anymore? You’ve beaten the game 3 times already! And piled up an unsettling amount of Dante corpses as well while you were at it. So, as you can see, this sort of thing has been going on since the previous generation.
Last but not least, the dreaded fighting game unlockable characters. As Yahtzee pointed out in his rant on the new SBB Brawl game(link), the whole point of purchasing a fighting game is to fight against other sentient beings(preferrably human), not some half-assed AI that the developers threw in there. Even despite the few different paths of unlocking the characters(either through leaving your console for several hundred hours or playing as every single character in the game whether you like the character or not), it still doesn’t make the game any more enjoyable. Perhaps the game developers wished that through torturing the player and force feeding them the available characters, the players will learn to *magically* appreciate each character they so lovingly created. The reality, of course, could not be further from this dream. The fact of the matter is, the larger the character base, the more people will be drawn to certain characters based on their looks and/or play style. It is only after they “mastering” this character that players tend to branch out to other characters as well. But this phenomena is for another time, and another article. The point is, unlockable characters in fighting games is just depriving the players and wasting everyone’s time.
Whatever happened to the old days of Megaman, where upon defeating a boss, you could use the various unlocked powers to either help you advance through a stage, or easily grind the boss into powdery metal particles? Those types of unlockables actually make sense, and even enhance the gameplay to a certain extent. Where did this mentality in game design go?
The closest I have personally been able to see this sort of game mechanic is in Monster Hunter, where they have you hunt monsters and create(or, to be technical, ”unlock” through gathering the necessary material”) weapons and armor from their dead bodies, using skill or teamwork to complete this task. The armors are usually helpful in killing other types of monsters due to their resistant attributes, and the same goes for the weapons as well. It’s no wonder why Monster Hunter has become such a huge success in Japan, it actually has an addictive and rewarding formula to it, as well as challenging gameplay.
Call of Duty 4 does a great job with it’s unlockable content, with cheats that are humorous and not exactly game breaking(enemies bursting into a bunch of old tires never gets old, especially with rag-time mode turned on), along with a bonus Arcade mode that gives the game a totally different feel even though you are essentially playing the same game over again.
Metal Gear Solid also needs to be given credit for its use of unlockable rewards(unlimited ammo or camo-stealth), because not only were they pretty helpful and not overpowered, there was also a good reason to beat the game again for its multiple endings.
The advent of xbox achievement gamer points only helps prove just how pointlessly obsessed the industry has become with letting rewarding players, and how some are so easily duped into this faux-competitive mentality. Some games, such as the infamous Halo 3, include armor for your character for purely aesthetic value(the hayabusa armor or the coveted recon armor) and this seems to follow along the same mentality as the people who are obsessed over comparing E-penises(penii?).
The solution I propose is a simple one: either make unlockable bonuses an informative one(such as the video interviews from GoW), or useful for advancing further into a bonus content level(where you can fully enjoy your newly attained rewards). Just don’t toss us the “golden gloves of fury” when we’ve already KO’d every contender that stepped into the ring, and are about to retire.